AUMC AV Blog

Yesterday I posted The Background, The Numbers, and The Setup for a battery test I ran overnight last night where I paired some regular Alkaline AA batteries against some rechargeable NiMH (nickel-metal hydride) AA batteries. And here are the results:

Click the graph for full size.
Note: The graph shows the length of time (in hours) along the bottom axis and the number of bars the battery indicator shows on each transmitter on the left axis ("-1" indicating that it fully lost power). I made the two Alkaline battery lines a green color to help group them together. Note that they are the two that stay at three bars the longest but they are also the first two to drop off.

There are three main things I took away from this:

1) The NiMH batteries won! No surprise here as Mike Sessler's battery test which this test is emulating (read about it here: Part 1 and Part 2) shows almost exactly the same graph. Just like in his tests the NiMH batteries lasted about 15% longer than the Alkaline batteries.

2) Also just like in Mike Sessler's tests, the NiMH batteries dropped bars quicker than the Alkaline batteries but in the end outlasted them. This is good to know so that when we are running the batteries we know not to freak out when we see two bars, but we should freak out when we see one bar!

3) My one surprise, and the one difference from Mike Sessler's tests, was that my test ran longer than his... by more than four hours (almost a third longer)! His test ran just under 14 hours, my test ran over 18! This could be for several reasons, including (but not limited to):
a) we may not have played music as loud as he did,
b) the transmitters were five feet away from the receivers,
c) we are using different transmitters than he is.

Anywho, I am super excited about the results from this test! Even worst case scenario we know that our new rechargeable batteries will last 16 hours, well more than we will ever need them!

If my opinion changes on this I will certainly let you know, but for now: I am excited that we went rechargeable, and I think other churches should too!

Matthew Kelling
Director of Media Ministry
Argyle United Methodist Church